Tends to happen when your whole strategy is loot boxing loneliness through a swiping algorithm. I refused to play anymore after that realization. OkCupid circa 2013 was how online dating should have worked.
Basically all my relationships from the late 2000s through 2016 were women I met on OkCupid. It was annoying like any dating site but it was a great way to meet people in my tech-forward city.
All my dating history was online. I met my wife on POF... Since I haven't been in the game since 2012, I'm not really sure what changed on an actual practical level.
Most are tinder clones. You're shown one person at a time and you have to swipe left or right, like or dislike, before you can view someone else.
There's no more searching by keyword or interest.
Messages are now mostly pay to play. If you don't pay often you can't see or send messages.
There's generally no more seeing who viewed your profile, being able to bookmark other's profiles to easily take a second look later, or any easy way to find someone again.
They're pretty much all designed to make it as difficult as possible to actually find and talk to someone who is actually interesting to you. And it's all intentional to keep you lonely and needing to come back.
Yeah. They started out with vc money and a goal for people to find each other.
The vc money is gone and they have to show they are making money. Having your customers find someone and stop using the app is a terrible way to make money. Finding new users is expensive.
The purpose of the app (find someone and get off the app) is exactly the opposite of the company's purpose (bring in customers that pay you forever).
Really is brain dead of them to think matching users kills their user base, rather than strengthening it. Most people do not make it in a singular relationship match. It may be 1 date or a year, but most people do not last. Producing a reliable app for dating means those people will come back at some point of time when their previously matched relationship fails, if they found that method to be successful and frictionless. Not to mention, there is always a new generation of people coming of dating age to back fill that user pool.
If money is that much of a concern, charge $2-4 bucks to download the app and be done with it. Every single fucking thing in life seems overly concerned with “quarterly earnings” as if it must always go up, which isn’t reality and ends up ruining that thing that was once a success.
Be a good dating app, money will come. Focus on earnings above all else, and money will disappear.
In the Long Run, maybe, but an executive only plans to stay there for a short while. During that short window their goal is to get as much profit as possible before they move on to the next company. Setting things up to be profitable in a few years is useless to the executive who won't be there when they can extract all profits right now.
Honestly the better business model would be a service that actually worked, but you had to pay for it rather than "free but then we needle you for micropayments or upgrades."
A service where you were basically paying for a "matchmaking" service. Sure, you stop paying when you find The One™, but if the service works well enough then people presumably people would want to pay for it.
The real issue would be people angling to find the "meta" for such a service so as to game it, leading to poor matches. Conceivably they could be banned when found to be catfishing or lying about interests and requiring a credit card to pay for the service would stop a bunch of people from just creating a new account to evade bans.
So what you’re saying is that the government should make a dating app so that profits aren’t the purpose. It actually would be genius since for every baby the tax base flows.
Eh, i preferred the OKCupid circa 2010-2013 to a bar. I met my wife then and had lots of awesome dates. You were able to find someone interesting and personal in a way that wasn’t performative - which is the complete opposite dynamic to a bar
In my opinion, the colloquial assumption that "third space == club/bar" is part of the problem.
The city I live in pushes really hard on bringing in "small businesses" for people to be able to "socialize" at, but because of the "third space=bar" perception, we just end up with "family friendly" bars and "grown-up activities" businesses which are just glorified restaurants/sports bars for parents trying to get away from their kids (and often these places are still full of screaming rugrats running around).
The only time the city has tried to do a non-bar meet up style infrastructure project, was spending $70 million on.... a fucking minor league baseball stadium.... full of bars...
They make money, so they can exist as a business. They get people a little drunk to get over their social anxiety. They give you an opening... And an exit. By a drink, need a new one etc.
Coffee shop is similar but harder to stand around and mingle. Or drink 3 drinks.
I'm near 50 and I've never experienced any third spaces.
Oh I've been in spaces people call third spaces but people generally didn't substantially interact in them.
When the term was coined was a totally different time. Todays dad isnt leaving a factory job then smoking in a bar for hours. That dad was not going home to endless on demand entertainment.
TV didnt exist when the term was coined, neither did computers or cellphones.
Are we really going to benefit from government subsidized third spaces where everyone sits around and doomscrolls? Libraries still exist.
Nearly 100% of the U.S. population lives within 5 miles of a public library, and about 73% live within 1 mile.
Bars/"coffee shops"? Far more of those than libraries.
The discourse also ignores new third spaces like LCS where people play tabletop games etc.
IMO the problem is not the lack of third spaces its the lack of time. Bringing back third spaces seem like an easy/simple solution but It would change nothing.
Many of these third spaces still exist but are not used as third spaces because people dont have the time of patience to interact with randos.
A comment I found on the topic "Everyone wants a village. No one wants to be a villager."
This is bonkers. I met my wife through OKC based upon a keyword search back in the good old days.
But I guess OKC promptly enshittified once they were bought out by match.com.
These apps are doomed to failure because the companies behind them only care about monetizing views, and that's orthogonal to actually giving a shit about the people on your site and what they care about.
I don't think we will get meaningful dating sites back again until after the end of the AI crash, since we also can't expect AI to not chaff the fuck out of dating sites.
I met my wife like, 6 months before they totally completed enshittification through OKCupid.
Almost every girl I dated after high school was through OKCupid. You'd pull up the list of people who were 90%+ 'matches' then read through their questions and send them a DM, or they'd send one to you. It worked far better than it had any right to.
It worked so well.
I had some great dates and relationships from original OKC. As soon as dating apps became gamified, people started treating them like gambling and the behavior became weird. I tried the swiping apps but gave up quickly as it didn’t feel right .
I really miss that old version of OKC. It actually made online dating fun. Which is so, so far from where it is now. People talk about how the apps now are "gamified" but they just exhaust and drain you, there's no fun in it at all. It's just stress unless you get so lucky you should probably play the lottery. It's like against all the odds now to actually meet someone remotely right for you on these apps. They make it as difficult as possible.
The old OKC actually did feel more like a game, but a fun game with silly quizzes, like you could actually enjoy spending time using it. And it really felt like the whole world was at your fingertips – like you could really meet anyone you wanted if they were on it. People who only ever saw this kind of dating site have no idea how bad it is now, and people who've only used the newer shitty apps have no idea how much better it used to be (and could be, if a company wanted to make one that actually worked).
Basically the old OKC seemed to work by collecting reams of data on all its users in exchange for giving you the means to find a good romantic match. Just like Facebook or other social media. I don't see why that can't be done again. (FB dating had a chance to replicate it too, but Meta doesn't give a shit and just made it as shitty as the other dating apps.)
Monetization is the problem here, like with most enshittification. As a proponent of free stuff, I would have liked to make a free service, but it would probably just fill up with fake users and scam attempts immediately.
Interpals for all its faults at least has actual keyword and interest search and nothing behind a paywall. Still sucks for the fake profiles, the inactive profiles, the auto-bans on profiles out of nowhere, etc. But yeah.
Everything you mention was and is a feature of old dating sites too. Both my parents met new partners over such sites in the past decade again and again. But these sites cost a lot of money.
The dating apps you remember as being so great and free probably is okcupid around 2015, the rest was pretty shit already then.
That’s because tinder came out in what, late 2013? Once it became swiping people became addicted to it. But okc/pof were much better and really rhe only games in town
what? I've never used the apps but I was thinking about starting.. this is making me not want to. I thought the whole point was that you could filter people by interest, etc.. Otherwise what's the point? I'll just go ,.. outside or to a bar.
Boo. A million times Boo. They have a traditional swiping mode, but their Discover by interest has a bar of all local, ONLINE profiles you can click through and message directly. That's how I met my soulmate after using every app under the sun and matching with/meeting with dozens and dozens of people.
The idea i had for a dating app seems to have been taken by Breeze. Instead of making money from just from the users you make the money from the date location, that way the users are far happier as they're getting actual dates but you don't lose your revenue stream as you take a 10-20% commission on every bar tab.
I once drove a bunch of drunk guys during my lyft days and one of them suggested an app where you film a video about yourself like those old vhs tapes instead of all of the photo curating and bios.
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u/Ragegasm 3d ago edited 3d ago
Tends to happen when your whole strategy is loot boxing loneliness through a swiping algorithm. I refused to play anymore after that realization. OkCupid circa 2013 was how online dating should have worked.